Scruples (18 page)

“Outside?”

“Dummy.” Jessica moaned, smiling at Billy’s skimpy grasp of life’s possibilities. “Outside of your own world. You have no idea of how limited that tiny little world is. Just because they all know one another, just because the people your aunts know in Boston, Providence, Baltimore, and Philadelphia are all connected to the people you might meet through them in New York, doesn’t mean that when you get just one step—one tiny step—away from the connections you can’t drop out of sight completely.”

“I just don’t see how,” Billy complained. Jessica was maddeningly elliptical sometimes.

“Jews.” Jessica gave Billy the smile of the smartest cat on the block, the cat who has just cornered the market on whipped cream and sardines. “Jews are perfect They don’t want to have things with nice Jewish girls either, because they’re all connected just the way we are, and they don’t want anything to get out about it any more than we do. So all my nines are Jewish.”

“What if you met a Jewish ten?”

“I’d run like a thief, I hope. But stop trying to change the subject. Now, how many Jewish men do you know?”

Billy looked blank. “Well, you must know some,” said Jessica,

“I don’t think so, except maybe that nice shoe salesman at Jordan Marsh.” Billy looked puzzled.

“Hopeless. I thought so. And they’re the best too,” Jessica muttered to herself, her lavender eyes bemused, unfocused, her summa cum laude brain picking and choosing and sorting possibilities.

“The best?” Billy asked. She had never heard that Jews were the best, except maybe for violin playing and chess and of course there was Albert Einstein and, well, you really couldn’t count Jesus. He had converted.

“For fucking, of course,” Jessica answered absent-mindedly.

Billy took to fucking Jews with an enthusiasm even Jessica couldn’t have matched. Jews were like Paris, she thought. A new world, a free world, a foreign world that was all the more exciting for being forbidden. In this unknown, secret world she had no secrets to keep. A Winthrop? From Boston? Perhaps historically interesting but essentially unimportant If they had gone to Harvard it would be highly unlikely that they would know any of Billy’s cousins because they would not have been asked to join any club more select than the Hasty Pudding. But just to be on the safe side, Billy never saw a Harvard graduate more than once and never let him kiss her. Even if he was a nine. There were so many nines it seemed. It was one big, wonderful world of Jewish nines if you knew where to look, and soon Billy became an expert NBC, CBS, ABC, Doyle-Dane-Bernbach, Grey Advertising,
Newsweek
, Viking Press,
The New York Times
, WNEW, Doubleday, the executive training programs at Saks and Macy’s—the list was rich, endless.

Billy became clever at avoiding German Jews, particularly those whose families had been in the United States for many generations. They had a disconcerting way of producing mothers who had been born Episcopalians, from families who might well know the Winthrop clan. Billy warned Jessica to stick to Russian Jews, if possible second- or third-generation Americans only. Anyway, they were more fun.

It was from Jews that Billy learned that she had never suspected the depths of her own sensuality. Gradually she learned to sink down into it and let herself go with the current. As she allowed herself to feed her appetites, her appetites grew. She became avid, avid for the feeling of absolute power she got when she felt the jutting stiffness of an engorged prick through an expensive pair of trousers, and she knew that in one swift movement she could uncover it, hold it, smooth and quivering and hot in her hand. She became avid for the electric moment when a man’s slowly exploring hand finally settled on her clitoris and found it already plump and wet, offering itself to his repeated, burning, stroking. She became avid for the rapturous time of expectation, which she drew out until it almost became pain, before a new lover parted the lips of her cunt with his cock and she finally knew what he felt like when he was all the way up inside her.

She became so sexually charged that sometimes, between classes at Katie Gibbs, she had to duck into the ladies’ room, lock herself in a stall, thrust a finger up between her thighs, and, rubbing hastily, have a quick, silent, necessary orgasm. Her Gregg improved steadily.

Billy had seven proposals of marriage from nines she didn’t love, and, reluctantly, she had to replace them. It would not have been playing the game fairly to keep them on the string after honorable intentions had been declared. Jessica had twelve proposals in the same period of time, but they decided that it amounted to an even number, because only men over six feet tall proposed to Billy, while tiny Jessica had a much wider field to appeal to.

All in all, she and Jessica decided, as they reached the end of the spring and Billy approached her graduation from the one-year course at Katie Gibbs, it had been a very good year. A vintage year. It was the spring of 1963, Jack Kennedy was President of the United States, and Billy, about to go for job interviews, took herself to the custom-order millinery salon at Bergdorf Goodman’s, at Aunt Cornelia’s behest, in order to have Halston, then Jackie Kennedy’s favorite hat designer, make her one perfect pillbox. “I want to look intelligent, efficient, capable, and chic—but not too chic,” she instructed him firmly.

The year at Katie Gibbs, with its punishing discipline and high standards, combined with the revelation of the possibilities of her body and its infinite uses, had given a final polish to the transformation that had started in Paris. Although Billy was five months short of her twenty-first birthday, she looked and sounded a superbly balanced twenty-five. Perhaps it was her height; perhaps her way of standing, poised as a ballerina waiting for her cue in the wings; perhaps her unconsciously patrician Boston accent, smoothed down but not entirely hidden by a combination of Emery Academy, Paris, and New York; perhaps it was the way she wore her clothes, so that she stood out from any crowd as instantly as a flamingo would among a flock of New York pigeons. Altogether a formidable girl.

“Linda Force? You mean you’re going to work for a woman?” Jessica cried incredulously. “After all I’ve told you about Natalie Jenkins, how could you?”

“First of all, there’s the money. It’s top dollar. They’re offering one hundred fifty dollars a week, which is twenty-five more than anybody else. Secondly, it’s a giant corporation with lots of room to move around in—up, up, and away! And my boss is very close to the powers that be. She’s the executive assistant to the mysterious Ikehorn himself. Anyway, when she interviewed me, I liked her and she liked me. I could tell—sometimes you have to go on your instincts.”

“Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Jessica said, drooping lugubriously.

During the first few weeks of Billy’s new job, the vast office next to Mrs. Force’s was empty. The Ikehorn Enterprises New York headquarters occupied three floors of the Pan Am Building and from the president’s office, thirty-nine floors above the street, all of Park Avenue unrolled into the dim distance of Harlem. Ellis Ikehorn was on a world tour of his various subsidiaries. His corporation, which Billy was only beginning to understand, reached into a circle of overlapping areas: land, industry, lumber, insurance, transportation, magazines, and building and loan companies. Linda Force talked to him several times every day by phone, sometimes for as long as an hour, and dictated a great quantity of letters to Billy after each conversation. Nevertheless, there was a feeling of a summertime lull in the offices in spite of the hundreds of employees moving busily about their tasks.

Billy was delighted when Mrs. Force asked her if she’d like to join her for lunch on a day when she didn’t have to eat at her desk while she patiently waited for one of the daily transatlantic phone calls. She was curious about her superior, a rounded, graying woman in her early fifties, who displayed no quirks of personality or dress but whose calm strength was obvious the minute you met her. Mrs. Force was commanding, in a beautifully unassertive way, Billy had observed. She had the vast, complicated business of Ikehorn Enterprises at her fingertips; she was on good-natured first-name terms with the presidents of all the Ikehorn companies; her word, in the absence of Ellis Ikehorn himself, was as final as his own, and as unquestioned. Here, certainly, was a woman at the top of the ladder.

“I’m a Katie Gibbs girl myself,” Linda Force told her after they ordered, smiling in memory. “Hell, wasn’t it?”

“Sheer hell,” Billy sighed, delighted to find her theories of how to succeed in business validated. “But worth it, wouldn’t you say?”

“Definitely. Of course one can’t give them all the credit There is just so much they can do.”

“Yes,” Billy breathed fervently.

Mrs. Force went on, musing. “When I think that all through college I couldn’t take shorthand—a crime, really.”

“What was your major in college?” Billy ventured.

“Prelaw at Barnard, with a heavy emphasis on business law, and I squeezed in some office management courses at CCNY during the summers,” Mrs. Force answered, sipping her ice tea. “Then I had a year at Columbia Law School before the money ran out. I’d been studying accounting during the summers, fortunately, so I was able to become a CPA without wasting too much time. As a matter of fact, it was during that last year that I went to Katie Gibbs, as a backup position.” She started on her chicken salad with gusto.

Billy was speechless. She had flunked algebra and geometry at Emery and was rocky on long division. Law—accounting—office management!

“Oh, it sounds a bit complicated now, but when you have to make a living—” Mrs. Force continued, looking encouragingly at Billy. “Why, twenty-five years ago I started just where you are today, as secretary to Mr. Ike-horn’s secretary.”

“But you’re his executive assistant!” Billy protested.

“Oh, that—that’s my title for—inspirational purposes I suppose. But in actual fact I’m just his secretary. Of course, I’m a super executive secretary, I don’t deny that. And it’s a marvelous job, but there is just no room in a business like this for a woman to go farther. After all, when you really think about it, what could I be? Plant manager? Board member? Chief counsel? I don’t have the proper training and I don’t have the ambition, frankly. Of course, without my law and accounting background I couldn’t have come this far.”

“Aren’t you being very modest?” Billy said, without much hope.

“Nonsense, my dear, just realistic,” Mrs. Force answered briskly. “By the way, Mr. Ikehorn’s coming back on Monday and I’m putting on two other girls to help me besides you. When he’s here the amount of work triples. You may not see much of him, but you’ll know he’s here.”

“I’m sure I will,” Billy said in a fiat voice. So she was one of three secretaries to the secretary of the boss, and
trapped
. It would be fatal to her employment record if she didn’t stick it out in her first job for at least one year, especially in such a prestigious company. Billy Winthrop, New York career girl, she thought ruefully. Well, at least it paid a living.

When Ellis Ikehorn entered his domain on Monday morning it was, Billy observed, something like Napoleon making a triumphant return from a successful campaign. The population of the office did all but stand up and give three cheers; he was followed by a procession of field marshals carrying heavy briefcases filled, unquestionably, with booty, and the big corner office immediately took on the qualities of a command post. Billy imagined, dourly that she could almost hear the sound of trumpets.

She was briefly introduced to Ellis Ikehorn by Mrs. Force as he left the building for lunch, and as she rose to greet him, she had the impression of meeting a westerner, not a New Yorker, a tall, deeply tanned man with thick, white hair worn in a crew cut, who looked a little like an American Indian because of his hooded eyes, his hawk nose, and the deep lines that ran to his wide, taut mouth.

Later that day, between letters, Ellis Ikehorn casually asked Mrs. Force, “Who’s the new girl?”

“Wilhelmina Hunnenwell Winthrop. Katie Gibbs.”

“Winthrop? What kind of Winthrop?”

“The Boston, Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts Bay Colony kind. Her father is Dr. Josiah Winthrop.”

“Jesus. What’s a girl like that doing in your typing pool, Lindy? Her father’s one of the top men in antibiotic research in the country. Don’t we fund the research he does? I’m sure we do.”

“Among many others, yes. His daughter’s here for the reason the rest of us are. She has to earn a living. No family money she told me, and you ought to know that even if her father has a research chair he can’t make more than twenty, maybe twenty-two thousand a year. That money you give goes for equipment and lab costs, not salaries.”

Ikehorn looked at her quizzically. She was earning thirty-five thousand a year with some stock options and worth every penny of it. Leave it to Lindy to know everyone’s salary.

“Did you make my appointment with the doctor?”

“Tomorrow morning at seven-thirty. He wasn’t too happy about the hour.”

“Tough.”

“Ellis, you’re a fucking medical miracle,” said Dr. Dan Dorman, the most eminent specialist in internal medicine east of Hong Kong.

“How so?”

“It’s not often I get the chance to see a man close to sixty with the body of a forty-year-old and the brain of a two-year-old child.”